**KNOWN AW ISSUE**
Please be aware, there is a known issue with Saga badging when observing the AW map.
The team have found the source of the issue and will be updating with our next build.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Please be aware, there is a known issue with Saga badging when observing the AW map.
The team have found the source of the issue and will be updating with our next build.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Options
15.0 Alliance Wars Update Discussion Thread
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Yeah but Miike does it sound like most of us actually wanted this?
Does your alliance suck and people don't move when they should? Find a new one
Not able to take down that mini-boss node without a couple KO's? Run arenas for better champs. Run AQ for rank up materials. Complete quests for more shots at better champs. Work harder. Try harder.
You're absolutely right in that not fighting should never be an optimal strategy.
You're absolutely right in that everyone should fight for the last node.
It's a competition though. It's a war. There will be winners and losers. There will be frustration. There will be KO's.
But that's why it was FUN!
You all have taken any and all risk out of AW. Without risk it's just straight up boring and there are 85 pages of people saying this over and over.
Well said, diversity is great, but without defender kills it's a terrible idea. All of AW is a terrible idea without defender kills.
Imagine real war without acknowledging the work the defenders have done for your country? There would be no value in what they have done so why would anyone strive for excellence defending their country if they would just be forgotten?
how bout giving us some better rewards for our troubles while you figure out how to make war the best for kabam
Your question: How do you expect a player to make that decision?
The answer is that this still hasn't changed. Those defenders you're placing are still getting kills. Even if your defender doesn't stop a Summoner dead in their tracks, if you manage just one kill, you are still improving your defense in war.
That kill means that you are making them either use another champion to continue to compete, or use a revive/potion (of which there is a limited amount they can use every war). If they lose again, they have to make that choice again. So while that kill no longer grants you points, to say that there is no easy answer to your questions is not true. You still want to place your best defender for the situation/node that gets Kills, because Kills reduce your opponent's ability to move forward.
Just because there are no longer points awarded for a Defender Kill doesn't mean there is no value in defense. Reducing the Champions and offense that your Opponent has at their disposal is a victory. Every time you reduce your opponent's ability to output in the War, it's a victory.
Basically, just like before, you're trying to halt or negatively impact your Opponent's ability to progress, rather than have them award you points. The goal of defense hasn't changed: Exhaust your opponent's Champions and ability to proceed.
Defender kills was the way it was calculated in the old system. A team was able to see if they were being out skilled, and make the decision to stop when they ran out of attackers and spend no items cause if they pushed through, they would lose on kills.
Now we have a situation where the result is an uknown until the end as there is no way to accurately calculate the other teams defender rating. So this gives the allys a reason to keep pushing, reviving, healing to clear the map in a hope that their defender rating is higher.
Actually this system is much easier to determine the winner. The higher rated alliance always has the advantage. The dev team clearly doesn't understand that they haven't done anything to prevent alliances to 100% the map so it'll all come down to defender rating. The latest "explanation" just shows how far from the mark they truly are.
Now I know this is an idea that is unlikely to get implemented but it takes a little bit of faith. Faith in the fact that if you lower prices, you will actually end up making more sales that wouldnt normally be made. Reduce the cost of reviving and potting up so people aren’t afraid to play and bring back the skill element of the game. Skill is the heart of AW, without it. It’s not war.
Do a 2 week sale to get your data. I’d be willing to bet that you make more money.
The only thing halting the other alliance from progressing on my defense is the fact that they will give me points for losing. Otherwise they will 100% our map and it will come down to diversity/rating. No skill involved whatsoever. I think you don't really understand this point.
... on offense. It seems clear that the goal was to make Alliance Wars more diverse, engaging, and fun on offense. Every single change is disengaging on defense. Eliminating defender kills eliminates the most critical way players were judging defenders. Diversity points dictated a very strong push to place fully diverse champions regardless of what the champions did (and continues to do so). Reducing the node difficulty reduces the ways in which a champion could synergize with and strengthen a node on defense. All of these changes are unambiguously disengaging for players placing defenders.
It does help attackers during the attack phase. It is easier to attack. There are less penalties for attacking poorly and dying. There is more chance for help to arrive on attack with portals and cross over paths. Attacking is a lot easier in every possible way.
The thing is, the only real difference between AW and AQ is defense. If you ignore defense placement then the attack phase has virtually identical game play to AQ. AW is different from AQ in a similar way that Map 6 is different from Map 5. Defensive placement is the gameplay option that exists in AW and doesn't exist in AQ. Players controlling the defensive map is what can make the attack phase fundamentally different from AQ: we aren't attacking the same computer every time, we are attacking different human beings every time.
I think diversity is an albatross, and Kabam shouldn't even want "more diverse" AW. What they should strive for is unpredictable AW. Some players want tough competition and some don't, but all of them could benefit from being surprised by what they find on the AW map. That's why you give the players the ability to place defenders. You want AW maps to be different every time, unlike the static AQ maps that are the same every time. That's the "diversity" you want: not to force people to place every single champion once. You want players to be encouraged to be unpredictable. Confusing diversity with unpredictability is at the core of some of the biggest complaints about 15.0 AW.
Wait. I thought the original issue was 1 out of 3 attackers died and that was bad because it discouraged them from continuing? Now you don't want everyone to make it to the end?
Can we just have old wars back?
Then why come out with a metric like Diversity that is mutually exclusive with a strong defense?
You're saying that the goal of defense hasn't changed, but it has. The goal of a defense is to be diversely difficult. There's no such thing.
I don't care how many points Diversity gives it goes against everything you just said. You removed defender kills and added Diversity. You're sending the wrong message and that's why people keep bringing up defender kills.
Remove diversity and let's start talking.
I'm sorry, but you have not played at a high tier, at least not recently. We all know your in game name, we know your rating compared to the other 12 in your alliance, we know exactly why you want these changes a 300k leader with sub 80k members should have no voice in this discussion. That is pure manipulation. You are not fighting opponents your strength, you ate taking the easy way out.
If this is an iterative process, remove the requirements for loss rewards. Might as well get something decent for already wasting your champs for 24 hours in a loss that is decided and having to wait yet another 24 hours with even more champs tied up in attack.
Furthermore, increasing the difficulty of the map isn't an issue, it is the scoring system, period. While I am still not a fan of this new map, the concept of being able to switch paths to help a teammate is good. Get rid of some of the dead spaces between nodes, so that when you move at the start, you can actually do something. Shortening the timers is pointless when there is more dead space on the map.
So, war. Yeah.
That's how it works
You can't kill me, I can kill you, I win. War.
By your so-called theory, the losing alliance would rank up over time and something something metric, something something, and that would all come out in the wash.
To address this - before the diversity changes, there were basically 5-7 defenders that every single player put, it was as predictable as AQ. You always knew who you were fighting, there was never a surprise basically. Though I still preferred the old system but to say it was less predictable is just plain untrue.
With all due respect, it has changed. I speak specifically for myself, although I reasonably assume I'm not alone.
You are incorrect when you say that even if the defender gets one kill that helps. It helps in theory. In practice it doesn't because getting one kill is not enough. Yes, if you can accumulate three kills then the player can be stopped. But that presupposes they won't revive. In 15.0 I am required to make a calculation I did not make in 14.0. If I place a second copy of a defender, is that worth the risk to my alliance because I am costing the a lot of points. Even if that defender gets kills if the other side revives and passes that node, I have just cost my alliance points.
This threshold effect in 15.0 doesn't allow me to focus on the performance of the champ. I have to compare the performance of the champ to the risk associated with losing points. That's something I did not have to do before. My decision process has undeniably changed. And it has changed in a way where since kills don't matter only stopping a player dead matters, you can't value a kill as an incremental step to stopping that player like you could in 14.0.
And it is not even about just that one defender. The problem is strategic in nature. It takes a lot of kills, on average, to stop an attacker. At least three, but since many players use revives, the statistical average is much higher. Lets say six kills is necessary before you can reasonably have a chance to halt a path. There's only about seven fights per AW path minus the final boss. Every single defender on that path must average one kill to stop the attacker. There's a threshold. One kill is worthless. Two kills is worthless. Even three kills might be worthless. Since kills award zero points, they *only* matter if I stop the player. Anything under that threshold gains me nothing. So when I place defenders, it is worthless to place one single strong defender in a sea of weak ones. The kills I get won't be enough to stop the attacker, and anything short of a stop costs my alliance points if I place a duplicate defender.
So to have any chance at converting kills to points I must go all in. I must place the strongest possible defenders on every spot on a path. And if I fail, my alliance is going to lose a ton of points and probably lose. If I hedge even a little, I might as well go all the way and place for diversity points. In effect, going for kills is like trying to draw a straight from scratch. Five out of five cards making a straight is awesome and I probably win. But four out of five cards to the straight is very likely worthless.
This is what is going on in my head, and a variation of this is likely going on in every other player's head that thinks strategically about defense. It is different than 14.0 in a fundamental way that places a huge risk burden on me if I do not place for diversity. The risk is ultimately not generally worth it.
Well not necessarily. Just cause someone doesn’t have a high rating, doesn’t mean they aren’t stacked with high level 5*’s and 4*’s. I have a lower rating than most of my ally but have more 4/55’s, 3/45*s and 5/50’s than most of them. They have more overall champs but at lower ratings. So going in, that isn’t the most reliable indication of a win or loss.
In one sense the new AW is less predictable than 14.0, but in a more important way it is actually a lot more predictable. In 15.0 I cannot predict which champion is likely to be on any particular node, outside of the boss/miniboss nodes, this is true. However, in 15.0 I also do not care which champions are on any particular node, so much so that I don't bother to even scout the placing player or even glance at all at the precombat screen, because I'm killing everything without significant difficulty. I cared who was placed on thorns. I don't care who is placed on 35% attack and 20% armor.
If Kabam released a whole bunch of champs that were stat-identical to currently existing champions and they only changed the appearance of those champions players would complain that Kabam didn't really increase the number of champions, they just reskinned them. That added no additional diversity to the game. 15.0 causes players to place more different champions, but it also reduces the preceived difference between champions. I contend that the net result is that 15.0 AW is not more diverse. It is artificially diverse, but is giving attacking players a more homogeneous experience.
Also, while some defenders were more popular than others, I used to see more than seven different defenders even discounting cases where it was clear the player had an undersized roster. Spider-man, Nightcrawler, Hood, Hyperion, Dormammu, Magik, Juggernaut, Iceman, Electro, Dr. Strange, Mordo, Black Panther Civil Warrior, Agent Venom, Rhino, Yellowjacket, Cyclops and Unstoppable Colossus (5* with MD) are all good defenders that show up a lot even in higher tiers for at least some nodes. Even Ultron showed up as a defender sometimes and isn't a bad choice on certain nodes. Stun immune or increased ability chance for example.
You are correct, but it's a general statement that is usually a correct assumption. Surely, there are some who don't rank lower tier champs as much (I'm only 320k and I have 3 r4 5*s, a few r3 5*s and about 20 r5 4*s or so).